Japanese consumer electronics and precision engineering products are wonderful – until they go wrong, whereupon you find that they are put together in such a way that they are impossible to open without tearing them apart and you have to pay almost as much as the thing originally cost to get it fixed – and it may well have to go back two or three times before it is right: the explanation, revealed in the Wall Street Journal is that the things were designed to be manufactured and assembled by robots, not by people – but there’s no mileage in programming a robot to repair the things it made, you’re meant to throw the toy away and buy another.
Content from our partners
